Calculating the cost of a data breach should be a part of every organization’s information security risk management strategy. It’s not an easy task by any means, but making efforts to do so upfront — as opposed to after a breach, when calculating cost is the last thing on the to-do list! — for your organization can help to assess risk and justify security investments. But where does one begin, and what should be considered in cost estimates? There are the usual suspects, or direct costs, relating to discovery, response, notification, and damage control such as:

Through this process, we uncovered a market that we believe is currently ripe for a major disruption: market demand for managed security services (MSS) remains extremely strong, customer satisfaction is higher than we’ve seen in the past, and current MSSPs tend to compete on delivery, customer service, and cost.

This isn’t to say MSSPs all currently offer the same services with the same level of quality – not by a long shot. Selecting the right provider still means that you must understand your needs and the areas you feel they can enhance your security program the most. Each MSSP we evaluated has solid overall security capabilities, but has unique strengths in certain security areas and use different deployment methods to bring their offerings to bear.

At the same time, however, we hear more decisions today come down to cost and execution, and as this becomes more commonplace, we begin to prepare ourselves for a shift in the market. In fact, we believe we’ll see significant changes over the next couple of years for three primary reasons: